Twitter Engineering Team Tackles 2 Critical User Problems: Find Out What

Twitter boss Elon Musk has recently addressed two significant problems that were causing difficulties for users on the social media platform, Business Insider reports.

The problems, which resulted in many tweets being undelivered and some high-following accounts being dumped, were addressed after a "long day" of meetings between Musk and the Twitter engineering team.

Musk, Twitter Engineers Address Major Issue

Musk took to Twitter on Saturday, Feb. 11, to advise users that the issues had been "mostly addressed." The first issue, he explained, was with the platform's "Fanout service," which was in charge of delivering the "following feed."

As said by Musk, when he tweeted, this service would occasionally become overloaded, resulting in up to 95% of his messages going undelivered. He stated that the Twitter team had rectified the problem by changing the "Following" feed to pull from search results rather than the Fanout service.

Look at Twitter Infrastructure

Twitter has long been known for its smooth and streamlined operation. Behind the scenes, a sophisticated network of services and technologies collaborates to provide users with a seamless experience. One critical component of Twitter's infrastructure is the "Fanout Service."

As this pre-Musk era blog post suggests, Twitter's architecture heavily relies on the Fanout Service. Tweets enter the system via the Write API. The Fanout Service processes the request and stores the tweet in the Redis cache when the Write API transmits it.

The Redis cache temporarily stores tweets, and the Timeline Service retrieves them and displays them on the user's home timeline. The timeline service then finds the user's home timeline on Redis and returns the tweets.

In short, the fanout service is the middleman between the write API and the timeline service. It processes the tweets and stores them in a cache before showing them to the user.

Problem with Twitter Algorithm

The second problem, according to Musk, was related to the platform's recommendation algorithm. He stated that the algorithm used an absolute block count rather than a percentile block count, causing accounts with many followers to be dumped even if the blocks only constituted a small fraction of their followers. Musk also stated that this issue was simple to exploit by spamming with bots.

The CEO's recent meeting with the engineering team was reportedly related to declining view counts on his tweets recently, with Musk stating that he was "only getting tens of thousands of impressions."

Additional Problems

In addition to fixing these technical problems, Musk said that Twitter would also fix problems with large fonts and the space between paragraphs this week.

Twitter users have expressed dissatisfaction with recent platform modifications, such as the font size and paragraph spacing, which some have found confusing and irritating.

Users claimed that the new font change had made the font smaller when they clicked on a tweet than just watching the preview.

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